What You Measure is What You Get.

Einstein :
Not everything that can be counted counts.
And not everything that counts can be counted.

About me.

I know enough to know that at 04.00am it gets dark out on the streets. It has done this for the last twenty odd years, to my knowledge and will probably continue for the forseeable future. At some stage in this ‘future’ I shall retire and probably won’t give a damn if it still gets dark at 04.00am. Until then I shall be out there, somewhere, lurking in the shadows because someone, somewhere will be doing stuff they shouldn’t and then, well then I will introduce myself. In the meanwhile I shall try to remain sane and remember why I joined in the first place and try to ignore all the people who piss me off by making the job more complicated than it should be.

Opinions

Any opinions contained in posts are mine and mine alone. Many of them will not be those of any Police Force, Police Organisation or Police Service around this country. The opinions are based on many years of working within the field of practical operational Police work and reflect the desire to do things with the minimum of interference by way of duplication for the benefit of others who themselves do not do the same job. I recognise that we all perform a wide range of roles and this is essential to make the system work. If you don’t like what you see remember you are only one click on the mouse away from leaving. I accept no responsibility for the comments left by others.

Recent Comments

C.T.C. Constabulary.

A Strategic Community Diversity Partnership.
We are cutting bureaucracy and reducing the recording of target and monitoring related statistics.
Our senior leaders will drive small, economical cars from our fleet surplus to save money to invest in better equipment for our frontline response officers.
We are investing money to reinstate station canteens for the benefits of those 24/7 response officers.
We have a pursuit policy. The message is that if you commit an offence and use a vehicle, we will follow you and stop you if necessary. It is your duty to stop when the lights and sirens are on.
We take account of the findings of the Force questionnaire and are reducing the administration and management levels and returning these officers to frontline response duties.
We insist on a work-life balance.
We have no political masters.
We are implimenting selection processes that take account of an individuals skills and proven abilities for the job. Our senior leaders will have one foot in reality and still possess the operational Policing skills they have long forgotton about and seldom used. All ranks are Police Officers first and specialists second.
We will impliment career development and performance evaluation monitoring of our leaders by those officers who operate under that leadership.
The most important role is that of Constable. All other roles are there to positively support the role and the responsibility of Constable and the duties performed.

Whichendbites

“We trained very hard, but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams we would be reorganised. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganising. It can be a wonderful method of creating the illusion of progress while creating confusion, inefficiency and demoralisation.”......Petronius

Just so.

Taxation is just a sophisticated way of demanding money with menaces.

Reality.

Only in our dreams are we free. The rest of the time we need wages.

Rank V’s Responsibility

Don't confuse your idea of how important you are with the responsibility of your role.

Meetings.

If you had to identify, in one word, why we will never achieve our full potential, Meetings would be that word.

There is always a bigger picture.

When there is no answer to your problem, there is always deflection from the need to justify giving an answer.

At the CTCC there are now serious efforts to try to re-brand the service provision under the cloak of something a lot less straight-forward than boiling an egg.

The new efforts to be seen to be licking the arses of the political masters seemingly knows no bounds. The new and wonderful strategy of making the Police Service fit for purpose in the 21st century has moved away from simply trying to hit whatever is the target of the latest trendy measuring quango.

We now have to make sure that everything is affordable to justify the money spent. Value for money, another justification phrase, will be measured to see if it hits all the right marks and benefits go to the most deserving cases who jump through all the right hoops..

We are having best practice, business strategy and economic sense added to the list of things to consider. Also add financially sustainable and one would accept some grey confused and muddled mind-set. It could be time to quit now.

Policing is not affordable because so much cannot be measured. It does not fit into the latest business plans and does not fit into any quarterly corporate profit projection that I have seen. It is service provision. Local services, armed forces, schools and hospitals all operate in the same way. Yet their budgets are constantly being reviewed and reduced to redistribute the efficiency savings for things that are, politically, better points scorers and offer better short term headlines.

Lets see…………………..

This credit crunch thing ?

For as long as I can remember, the banks and financial institutions have been making millions of profits every year, without fail. Like the phone company, the gas, water and electricity suppliers, they all make millions of profit when their annual results hit the media. How come that some of them can turn around such big losses in so short a time ?

This money invested in Icelandic Banks ?

This reduction needed in public services ?

The tax payer will bail out the Government’s allegedly prudent taxation and spending policies. The tax payer will have to bear the brunt of someone else’s failed policies and decision making processes because essential public services will have their budgets reduced at the same time that someone, somewhere, will appear on the TV or in the media trying to make everyone believe that it is all someone else’s fault or that everything is looking rosy. Exactly how much money, allegedly invested, was lost ?

At a time when the continuing efforts to spend less but convince all that more is being done and more is being spent simply confirms the efforts to promote the brand at all costs is the most important thing to do.

The only ones who do not seem to worry about the problems are the politicians. They seem to be doing alright and are either exempt from the problems or exempt themselves from the problems because they deem themselves a special case.

Smug, arrogant and couldn’t give a toss.

Trouble is, there is always a healthy queue forming up to be the next decision maker. Where talk and meetings are second only in importance to what expenses one is able to claim.

After all that, I am still at a total loss as to how so many local authorities, health authorities and Police authorities found so much spare cash to ‘invest’ in a foreign country’s financial institutions. At the same time we have listened to how much they are cutting back on because they are so hard up.